This is going to get a wee bit complicated. A swordsman called Li Mak-Yin (Adam Cheng) is looking for a man named Wah (or Fa, in any case played by Feng Tien) who is supposed to be the greatest swordsman of the age. Li Mak-Yin has the ambition to claim that title for himself. Finding Wah isn't easy, though, because the man has retired and hides away from the masses of minor swordsmen that want to fight him to prove their worth.
After searching for ten years, Li Mak-Yin finally finds the older swordsman's trail. A trader in information sells him a map to Wah's supposed home. Unfortunately it turns out to be lying in ruin. Only another searcher for Wah dwells there. He is quite mad and attacks Li Mak-Yin, whom he thinks to be Wah. After a short but intense fight, the mad man's head flies into the sunset. Our designated hero decides to rest in the empty ruins.
In the middle of the night a young woman (Jade Hsu) suddenly jumps through his window and into his bed. As this is something that happens to wuxia heroes regularly, his reaction is quite blasé. So blasé as to irritate the young lady enough to jump annoyed out of the room. She prefers dealing with the guy she's trying to escape from to the sudden smell of male smugness her would-be rescuer exudes. My, my, is she falling in love with him?
Li can't let the whole affair just jump away and follows the fleeing girl and her enemy, until he finally wounds the man and drives him away.
Alas, the woman does not show much gratitude and storms away. As luck will have it (a phrase you'll hear quite a bit in the following), both seem to be heading in the same direction and soon a heavy rainfall forces them to seek shelter in the same place. After a few shenanigans with food and drink, the two befriend each other and decide to make their way to the next town together.
When they come upon an inn, Li suddenly starts to act very distant. As luck will have it, a woman who arrives at the exact same moment as the two is Yin Siu-Hyu (Qiqi Chen), the love of his youth whom he left to pursue the elusive Wah.
Their meeting is full of repressed emotions and dutiful recognition of their social responsibilities. Nonetheless another window jumper suddenly attacks Li only to be called back by Yin Siu-Hyu's arriving husband Lin Wan (Norman Chu). He seems to be a nice enough fellow; a little too fearful for his wife's security perhaps. Li finds the situation kind of awkward anyway and excuses himself as fast as possible only to find that his other girlfriend has run off in a fit of jealousy.
While he follows her, we learn that Lin Wan isn't as nice as we thought. When his wife defends Li a little too eagerly for his taste, he hits her. As luck will have it, Lin Wan is also looking for Wah and does not like competition. So he sends his main henchman out to kill Li, while he himself takes care of the information trader.
Being a designated hero, Li is not that easy to kill. The fight ends inconclusive, with Li seriously hurt.
Fortunately a woman named Yeun Kai (Chau Wa Ngai) finds him and tends to his wounds. When he is well again, his rescuer receives a letter concerning an old friend of hers, a master swordsman whose enemies have kidnapped his daughter to press him into dueling them. Yeun Kai asks Li to rescue said daughter, something he does gladly when he reads that her father's name is (as luck will have it) Wah. His host even gives him a sword Wan once gave to her, although without knowing that it is an evil sword that will bring only suffering to the one who wields it (and obviously the ones hit by it).
Li is able to rescue Wah's daughter. She is, as luck will have it, the same girl he befriended before. She gladly takes him to her father who is very grateful for Li's deed. Grateful enough to grant the younger man his wish for a duel (which pisses off Ying-Chi royally).
Since we are still far from the end of the movie, Li wins the duel while wounding Wah only slightly.
Li is quite dissatisfied with the way things turned out. It's not as fulfilling to be the best than he always thought it would be. Well, he shouldn't fret, the film has a few more bad surprises for him, starting with Lin killing the recuperating Wah by deepening the wound he already received from Lin, so that Ying-Chi swears vengeance on Li while Lin steals what he really wanted - not fame for the killing of Wah, but the man's sword; and, now that he really thinks about it, Li's sword would be nice, too.
How will Li escape these cunning plans? How many of the three women will survive the final reel? Will there be more destined twists of fate?
As you can see, The Sword's plot is quite complicated even for a wuxia and relies even more heavily on luck than many masalas. That's not a big problem when one is able to accept the concept of fate or destiny as the base of the film's intellectual and especially moral world, as one just accepts faster than light travel in a space opera.
More problematic is that the film feels like a very uneasy marriage of different styles that director Patrick Tam can't fuse well enough to form a film that's a complete artistic success. Firstly we have a stiffened variation of classic wuxia melodrama that's just a little bit more slow-going than those elements usually are - unfortunately this "little bit" is the important bit that drags the film down and makes it feel a lot longer than the lean 85 minutes it really is.
Secondly we have a few moments of much more real (in an art house sense) human emotions, two of them bound to short bursts of violence that aren't as bloody but much more shocking than a decapitation. In themselves, these are highly successful scenes, but they don't fit into the same world as the action sequences or the melodrama.
Thirdly there is a handful of great to brilliant action scenes directed by Ching Siu-Tung, that are - except for the final fight - not as over the top as some of his later directorial works, but are reason enough to slog even through the most dishonest of melodramatic scenes. The use of the color red in the last few scenes is especially striking and in a few minutes does a lot more to connect the melodrama to the fighting than the rest of the film did in an hour.
A reason for the strange schizophrenia The Sword shows could be the awkward historical place it takes. In 1980, the traditional swordplay film was more or less dead (if you ignore the works of Chor Yuen, who either didn't or wouldn't care), first replaced by the kung fu film, then by the new wave of kung fu; it would take a few years more until people like Ching Siu-Tung and Tsui Hark would renew the genre (in a way unthinkable without the films of Chor Yuen, but that's really another story). I take films like this or Hark's artistically more successful Butterfly Murders as first steps on the way to the new wuxia. Unfortunately, first steps aren't always satisfying.
Further complicating the matter is the future career path of Patrick Tam which soon lead him to much more art house oriented films that agreed a lot more with his sensibilities.
All in all, The Sword isn't the kind of film I'd recommend to people who haven't watched a lot of wuxia movies, but for those of us who have, it's an interesting object of study with the added bonus of a handful of brilliant scenes.
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